Online shopping and auction websites provide a number of publishing, listing, and price-setting mechanisms whereby a seller may list or publish information concerning items for sale. A buyer can express interest in or indicate a desire to purchase such items by, for example, submitting a query to the website for use in a search of the requested items.
The accurate matching of a query to relevant items is currently a major challenge in the field of information retrieval. An example of such a challenge is that item descriptions tend to be short and are uniquely defined by the sellers. Buyers seeking to purchase the items might use a different vocabulary from the vocabulary used by the sellers to describe the items. As an example, an item identified in the title as a “garnet” does not match a query “January birthstone” submitted by a buyer, although garnet is known as the birthstone for January. As a result, online shopping and auction websites that use a conventional search engine to locate items may not effectively connect the buyers to the sellers and vice versa.